Sara Majka‘s debut story collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, begins with movement: “Maybe ten or eleven years ago, when I was in the middle of a divorce from a man I still loved, I took the train into the city. We were both moving often during this time, as if it were the best solution to a shattered life: to move from place to place, trying to thread together, if not marriage and our lives, then something in ourselves.”
Why do we travel, and how do we write about why we travel? As if addressing the difficulty, the first line of Cheryl Strayed‘s Wild is: “My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings.”
Sara Majka’s beginning is straightforward—a character ten years out from the middle of a divorce recalls taking a train, and in the same breath, recalls the reason for all that movement: “trying to thread together […] something in ourselves.”
Read the rest of this article on the Ploughshares blog: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/writing-travel-a-process-of-unmooring/
